I don’t remember the first time that I hit the bottle (I was probably a teenager), but I do recall the first time I hit the bottle hard.

It was a few years ago and our Labrador, Brum, had left what one might politely describe as a base-note of eau de chien in our mud-spattered Camry.

With a pending appointment to pick up my wife and her girlfriend in our shame-inducing Stinkmobile, I dashed into our apartment and ransacked the beauty closet for a fast fix. Voila! With a bottle of Diptyque’s Feu de Bois parfum d’intérieur, I returned to the car and gave the cab a good drenching in $70 French room fragrance.

[np-related]

By the time I collected my unwitting passengers an hour later, our car smelled like a crackling Northern bonfire, with sweet spruce topnotes and a smoky, luxurious undergirding of woodsy goodness. Dog? What dog?

Inhaled out of context, my wife didn’t immediately recognize the car’s new scent signature, but eventually it clicked. “You used the Feu de Bois, didn’t you?” she said with a grin, after our guest had been dropped off, none the wiser.

Hello. My name is Craig, and I have a spritzing problem. Since that first daring plunge into what I refer to as my “secret fragrance follies,” I’ve slowly grown addicted to ever pricier and more extravagant scent options, sprayed not on myself but in every room and enclosed space, sometimes, admittedly, to disastrous results.

There was the occasion, for example, that I foolishly matched Guerlain Homme L’eau with Chanel’s classic Cuir de Russie as a room deodorizer, which created the nostril-searing effect of a French bordello at midnight. The louche, decadent fog lasted days, settling on our carpets and couches and refusing to budge.

If I were trying to assign blame for my repurposing stunts with high-end fragrances, it would only be right to begin by pointing a finger at Lysol and Glade and all the other mass-market products that conjure, in my sensitive nose, the regretful ambience of hospital latrines or tenement hallways after the janitor’s monthly visit.

A decade ago, when my late parents were ill and bed-ridden, their home-care nurse relied heavily on Lysol as an anti-bacterial solution to the inevitable spills and messes that occur in the wake of elderly illness. The spray’s tell-tale astringency — severe and pungent — can even now transport me, with one whiff, to those sad days.

The fact is, though, my expensive spray tastes would never have taken flight were it not for the enabling effects of my wife, Liza, a beauty writer who acquires free cosmetics and fragrances the way, say, a squirrel collects acorns and seeds.

One of the most frequently heard lines in our shared work office is: “Here, try this!” as she thrusts some new potion at me, which has usually arrived via courier, or which she has carted home from a press event. In life I am her monkey proxy, here to be primped and spritzed and tested until some mysterious consensus about the cosmos is forged.

Scent is really how we connected 15 years ago, bonding over a mutual regard for vetiver and cedar and rich, musky ointments that we traded back and forth like teenagers making mix tapes for each other. “The patchouli really works, but only if you cut it with a dab of neroli,” and so forth.

Friends wanted to slap us, sure, but it’s good to have an esoteric “couple’s thing” — and there are already enough people in the world with matching curling sweaters and his and her golf clubs.

I’ll never forget the day, and the horror, when Liza returned home with the grim news that my favourite men’s fragrance, Intimately Beckham (go ahead, laugh), had fallen into “limited distribution” (a retail term that loosely translates to: Good luck finding us, Jack).

“There, there,” my wife said, trying to ease the pain. “We’ll get you something even nicer.” What she did instead was to search high and low and this past Valentine’s Day presented me with two precious bottles of the elusive Beckham.

In addition to liking its nutmeg sillage, I’ve discovered it makes a terrific room spray if mixed with a light aura of Chanel’s Allure Homme.

But I have to ration my room blasts. There may be no more of it after this, which, I have to tell you, is the saddest news in the world for a self-confessed scent junkie.